The present invention relates generally to an interactive customer-business interview system and a related process for managing the interview flow. Specifically, the invention relates to a system and process for scripting questions, maintaining questionnaires used during customer interviews, and for asking follow-up questions based upon the customer""s responses to prior questions.
A business that interacts with large numbers of customers and clients, over a variety of communications channels including telephone, mail, Internet and in person, may desire a means to track those customer interactions for a variety of reasons including providing better service to existing customers, retaining new customers and to determine the means which is most effective at reaching or generating new customers and identifying existing customers to whom new services should be offered.
Additionally, with the increased consumer demand for Internet-based sales sites and catalog sales, and with the rise of the direct marketing industry and the increased use of outsourced sales and customer-service forces by many businesses, there is a need by businesses to provide xe2x80x9cscriptsxe2x80x9d to their sales and customer-service forces who may not have intimate knowledge of all of the products they try to sell consumers over the phone or the companies whose products they are trying to sell.
Moreover, if businesses using such alternate communications channels had a means to collect data about customers, their buying patterns, their complaints, repeat business, and other such customer information and had a means to access such information while a customer-based interview was in progress, they could provide more efficient and effective service to such customers and could also tailor their marketing or service efforts specifically to individual customers.
For example, assume a hypothetical scenario in which a business has a customer call center staffed by agent personnel who field incoming customer calls. The business maintains a database which has a record corresponding to each customer who has ever placed a product order using the customer call center. Each record has information such as the customer""s name, address and telephone number. A call center agent, upon answering an incoming customer call, may see a telephone number displayed representing the telephone number from which the incoming call was placed. The call center agent may query the call center database by inputting the telephone number for the incoming call to ascertain whether any records in the database list the same telephone number.
The business may also maintain software that can generate a script for the call center agent to use to assist the agent in handling the interview with the customer. For example, if the call center performs a sales-related function, then the script may include a number of questions designed to generate orders for particular products. Alternatively, if the call center performs a customer service function (e.g., an information services help desk to respond to customers"" problems or errors when using software or computer systems), then the script may include questions designed to try to determine the specific computer error the customer is experiencing and the script may also set forth potential resolutions or fixes of the computer error. There are multiple other scenarios in which a business may employ a xe2x80x9cscriptxe2x80x9d for its personnel to use for multiple additional purposes. Those set forth above are meant to be illustrative only.
Businesses which have implemented customer-related systems and processes of the type described above have found many deficiencies in the current systems and processes. Many of the current systems/processes are not designed for applicability across multiple channels that a business may use to communicate with its customers. Businesses using such systems do not want to have to create and use multiple different customer systems for their telephone sales, catalog sales, Internet sales and in-person/store sales, for example.
Moreover, the prior systems/processes do not always integrate databases containing customer-specific records with their systems/processes which generate xe2x80x9cscriptsxe2x80x9d for their sales forces. Therefore, the scripts may be deficient because they may not be designed to sell the business"" most popular products, for example, or the scripts may not address the customer""s specific inquiry. Or, the scripts may require an agent to ask each question contained in the script without the flexibility of customizing the questions based upon a specific customer""s more particularized inquiries. (A good example of this scenario is when a call is placed to an automated voice messaging system which leads a caller through a list of predetermined potential choices of informational topics for which the caller may select one choice by pressing a number corresponding to the selected choice. If the customer has an inquiry that does not fall within one of the predetermined potential choices, the customer may hang up, or may select a choice merely to continue to hold the line, but may obtain information that is not responsive to the customer""s actual inquiry.)
Additionally, since such existing systems/processes are generally not customized, they may require the agent to do significant re-programming to create the desired script for a particular application. Moreover, after the original customization of a script is completed, such preexisting systems/processes may nevertheless be deficient because they may require further programming in order to make any changes to the original customized script.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an interactive system and process for managing an interview flow during a customer interaction which is applicable to multiple communications channels used by a particular business.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and process for generating customer-based scripts that are easily modified, adapted and maintained and that can be tailored to address the specific customer""s needs.
It is an additional object of the present invention to provide an interactive system and process for managing an interview flow during a customer interaction which is flexible and uses the customer""s response to a question to determine a follow-up question.
Additional objects and advantages of the present invention will be set forth in part in the description which follows, and in part will be obvious from the description, or may be learned by practice of the invention. The objects and advantages of the invention may be realized and attained by means of instrumentalities and combinations, particularly pointed out in the appended claims.
To achieve the objects and in accordance with the purpose of the invention, as embodied and broadly described herein, in its broadest aspects the present invention relates to a process for generating a script for an agent system to use in conducting an interactive interview with a customer wherein content of the script is controlled by data stored in a database. Preferably, the database comprises a questions table including a plurality of questions stored therein to be used by an agent conducting an interview with a customer, an answer table having stored therein a plurality of alternative answer choices responsive to each one of the plurality of questions, and a branching table having a plurality of rules stored therein for determining the sequence of the questions which the agent communicates to the customer based on the customer""s selected answer to a preceding one or a first question. Specifically, the data stored in the database is used to control the order in which the plurality of questions in the script are asked of the customer.
The steps in the process include a first step wherein the agent system retrieves a first question from the questions table in the database and a list of a plurality of alternative answer choices for the first question from the answers table in the database. The agent system then communicates the first question and the list of the plurality of alternative answer choices for the first question to the customer. The customer selects an answer from the list of the plurality of answer choices communicated by the agent and the agent system determines a next question based on the selected answer and a branching rule stored in a branching table for such selected answer in the database. The agent system then retrieves the next question from the questions table and a list of a plurality of alternative answer choices for the next question from the answers table and communicates the next question and the list of alternative answer choices for the next question to the customer. The above steps are repeated until an xe2x80x9cendxe2x80x9d statement is retrieved from the branching table.
The process for generating a script in accordance with the present invention is advantageous because the generated script can be easily customized to specific customers or product lines or other specific uses of a business without the need for re-programming.
Generally, instead of being controlled by program code, data stored in the database tables controls the order of questions to be asked during the interactive customer interview. Moreover, adding, changing or removing questions from the script, and re-ordering the sequence of the questions used in the script can be accomplished by simply updating the database tables rather than writing an entirely new computer program.